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In German legend, the alchemist and scholar Faust made a deal with the devil in which he accepted eternal damnation after death in return for a life of pleasure based on magical powers. We still call this deal a ‘Faustian pact’, the story of Faust having remained pretty much constant through more than five centuries of adaptation, starting with Christopher Marlowe’s play The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1604), Goethe’s drama Faust, several operas, many prose and poetry works, the musical Damn Yankees (1955) and numerous films.

It’s a powerful story, almost mythical, but it may well have been based on a real man – Johann Georg Faust who lived from around 1480 to 1540, and was an astrologer and alchemist. Since he wrote horoscopes and generally performed magic tricks around southern Germany in a God-fearing age, he gained a reputation as a man with a dark side. Indeed, he was accused of everything from fraud to sodomy by his enemies, who included the all-powerful Catholic Church. The fact that he supposedly joined the Protestant cause as soon as it sprang up may well have occasioned the Church’s disdain, and he was condemned as being in league with the devil. This Dr Faustus also died in an explosion allegedly caused by his own experiments, thus getting the legend off to a suitably gruesome start.